Permalinks and a Company’s Fortune

by Joshua Porter  |   2 Comments

Why There’s No Escaping the Blog on Fortune.com discusses living (and dying) by the blog. One of the most interesting parts is the following:

“A big reason for (the growth of blogging) is a tiny innovation called the permalink: a unique web address for each posting on every blog. Instead of linking to web pages, which can change, bloggers link to one another’s posts, which typically remain accessible indefinitely. This style of linking also gives blogs a viral quality, so a pertinent post can gain broad attention amazingly fast — and reputations can get taken down just as quickly.”

Although I think that there are many reasons for the growth of blogging (among them tools like Movable Type and Blogger, RSS, and a growing comfort with the Web), I think that permalinks are interesting. What I find even more interesting, though, is that writers at a money magazine are talking about technological details like a permalink leading to the changing fortunes of today’s companies.

Comments ( 2 Responses so far )

1.  Ottawa on January 5th, 2005 (Comment) #

That is nonsense.

People linked to each other from the beginning of the days of HTML. It was the whole point of HTML after all!

2.  Josh on January 5th, 2005 (Comment) #

Of course you’re right, Ottawa. However, the excerpt I grabbed specifically talks about the importance of permalinks as individual URLs for each post, which are a newer fad (though not necessarily a newer technology) than a page-level linking.

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